Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.

It's a Marx train, for sure, but it's running on Lionel O gauge track. One might speculate that Dad has the Lionel rolling stock stashed away somewhere, waiting for the boys to grow up a bit. At their age the smaller, lighter Marx equipment would seem more user friendly.

That little train is a Louis Marx train. Although Marx was an inexpensive alternative to Lionel, they do enjoy a small following in the collector's market today. They don't command much money but they are an interesting toy. They were far more diverse and eclectic than Lionel too. Anybody remember the Marx play sets of the '50's and '60's like "Fort Apache", or the "Knights and castle" set?
Oh, and the metal airplane looks like a "Brewster Buffalo" to me. The Buffalo was a short lived fighter at the outbreak of WW2.
I'd take any of these toys. They are a great reminder of how something so simple could keep your imagination going all day. Yesterday my Grand Nieces, all under 7, had brand new tablets under the tree. But still, in the end, they spent a good portion of the day in my back yard playing with an old football. That made me happy.

My mother used to make slipcovers for our upholstered furniture. She had red tones for winter to make the living room look warmer and blue covers for the summers when it was hot. Twice a year she changed them, every year. Don't know if their mother made it, like mine, or if she bought it. But the green couch of 1959 is the same couch as the pink one the year before.

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.